Solaris internals
by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro · first published 2006
11mentions
4recommended by
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2010–2024first – last mentioned
36% recommend64% neutral
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…Device Drivers, 3rd ed (o'Reilly) - Jonathan Corbet The Linux Programming Interface - Michael Kerrisk The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd ed) - McKusick, McKusick, Watson Solaris Internals - McDougall, Richard, Mauro
on “Ask HN: What programming skills are required by HFT or Trading firms” ↗…books are quite interesting. "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" "Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach" "Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture" "HP-UX 11i Internals" "IA-64 Linux Kernel: Design and Implementation"
on “The Source History of Cat” ↗…overboard to solve what is in effect a niche problem. (After all, 30 years ago, engineers at Sun architected the Solaris kernel with very carefully designed fine-grained locking with little more than C. "Solaris Internals" is still highly recommended.). There are a lot of other strategies for writing concurrent systems, like, for example, making most data immutable, coarse-grained sharing, shared-nothing multi-process…
on “A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop” ↗Not exactly the same thing but I found the following books quite useful for understanding how a lot of kernle code works: - The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System - Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture Still, nothing beats reading the source code :-)
on “Complexity of FreeBSD VFS using ZFS as an example” ↗Curiously, neither of these is listed: https://illumos.org/books/wdd/eqbqn.html https://www.amazon.com/Solaris-Internals-OpenSolaris-Archite...
on “A book list for OS kernel developers and device driver writers (2006)” ↗I have the Hillegass book (he is a friend of mine). I have: - Modern Operating Systems - Operating Systems Concepts - Operating Systems (Design and Implementation) - Solaris Internals - Design of the FreeBSD Operating System Sorry for being vague. I just dont have them in front of me right this second...but I cab get more specific if you want.
on “Gift HN: Book Giveaway/Exchange” ↗…sure how the multiplexing worked), but they later moved to a direct mapping (every thread really is backed by a kernel-managed thread). (I could be completely wrong about that, I just skim-read the 'Solaris Internals' book once.)
on ““POSIX advisory locks are broken by design”” ↗Hm I have Modern Operating Systems and Solaris Internals somewhere here I'd be willing to put up also. (Hard to part with McKusick's fbsd book..) I'm definitely going to add a bunch tonight.
on “Gift HN: Book Giveaway/Exchange” ↗but that's what the topic of the article in its title is. I say that as someone who once had a Solaris Internals book (and worked at Sun in that area), and it would be pretty great for that book's explanation to be online for Java people who didn't use original green threads to see.
on “Guide to Java Virtual Threads” ↗We used to have a piece of Java software called Scout - it did a lot of small memory allocations... Led to runtime of multiple days for some datasets. I was reading the book Solaris Internals. The edition I had was updated for the ultrasparc 3's, and I was reading that section that talked about memory pages and the new support for huge pages, eg 4GB pages. We switched on 4GB pages and the…
on “What Adrian Did Next – Part 2 – Sun Microsystems (2022)” ↗…for years without issue - was something cool too. the guy who found and fixed a kernel bug offering the biggest performance win in Solaris 8 in the course of writing the first book in a series called Solaris Internals - wow. the description of "the can of worms project" in which they run workloads that look like what customers might use, things that that go beyond typical eng team benchmarks, and the meltdown prevention…
on “What Adrian Did Next – Part 2 – Sun Microsystems (2022)” ↗